


Hard Way to Go

by s0ymilk



Series: Blackbird [2]
Category: Fallout 3
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Friendship, Gen, I'm Sorry, I'm just delivering, Male-Female Friendship, Nothing I write can be happy, Original Character Death(s), Prequel, Suicide Attempt, You asked for Charon-Willow scenes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-06
Updated: 2017-03-06
Packaged: 2018-09-28 16:12:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10134827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/s0ymilk/pseuds/s0ymilk
Summary: It's easy to forget how quickly things can fall apart. Willow's life is there, and then it's not. (Blackbird prequel - Willow's backstory)





	

**Author's Note:**

> HERE'S THE WILLOW BACKSTORY YOU ALL DIDN'T ASK FOR. 
> 
> Warnings at the bottom, as always. Title is from 'Angel from Montgomery' - for Willow, it has to be the Carly Simon version.

“You’re going out _again?_ ”

Willow looks up from where she’s loading her hunting rifle. Greg is standing there, arms crossed over his chest, his dark hair in disarray. He looks pissed. Willow gives him an unimpressed look and goes back to her task.

“Yeah, unless you want to starve tonight. We have no food, in case you forgot.”

Greg’s fingers tighten on his arm, the dirty gold band around his ring finger standing out in stark relief. Willow’s already slipped her own off and into a pocket, since the kids are hauling water and won’t see her before she leaves.

“You’re not leaving to hunt.” Greg says angrily. Willow knows exactly what he’s saying, but she chooses to ignore it and holds the hunting rifle up in front of his face instead, as if to say, “See?” Standing up, she slings her canvas pack across her shoulders and checks to make sure the extra tarp is inside, in case she gets something big enough she needs to drag it back. Everything is in place.

“If you wanted to go hunting, why didn’t you go earlier? It’s going to be dark before you get back, we need you here.”

Willow stops and scowls at him. Greg, a true instigator but not a brave man, takes an involuntary step back at the look on her face.

“I would have gone earlier, _dear,_ if you’d been manning the shop instead of flirting. And maybe if you’d been manning the shop instead of flirting, you could have traded for some food so we could eat tonight, instead of for caps that I know went straight into your pocket.”

She turns and strides off, ignoring the muttered, “ _Bitch,”_ behind her. If she stays any longer, she’s going to shoot him, and then Carla and Andy will cry. Her own mother had always said you’d put up with a lot to keeps your kids safe and happy; now that she’s a mom, she understands. Doesn’t make her wish to knock Greg’s teeth out any weaker. Just more well-hidden.

The further she gets from the caravan, the more relaxed her shoulders get, until she’s able to stop, take a deep breath, and let it out easily. Willow likes it out here in the Wastes, always has ever since she was a little girl. Too little to go out on her own, her daddy had always told her, but Willow didn’t listen then just like she doesn’t listen now. This is her place in the world, the only place she feels at home. The fact that it’s filled with poisonous, mutated monsters doesn’t bother her.

She kneels and searches the landscape for any trace of tracks or broken foliage. It’s been dry these past few weeks, so there’s not a lot to go on, but she’s able to find a faint trail that leads to a mole rat burrow. She doesn’t even need the hunting rifle for this; instead, she just unwraps the chunk of raw meat she’d brought with her, sets it a few feet from the burrow, and waits. When the mole rat comes sniffing out into the sun, Willow is on it instantly, plunging her knife into its neck. It dies with a squeal and a final last full-body shake. Willow pulls it out of the way, tucks a strand of errant hair behind her ear, and waits for the next to emerge.

It’s dusk when she finally tips the third molerat onto the tarp and wraps one edge over her shoulder, so she can drag it back. The molerats aren’t terribly heavy once they’ve been gutted. She stops when the faint sound of a gunshot rattles across the land, followed by another, and then a whole barrage. It’s coming from the direction she’s headed.

“ _Shit,”_ she says, dropping the tarp and breaking out into a run. How far away had she trekked? 30, 45 minutes? It’ll take her at least 15 to get back at this pace. She steps on the edge of a hole, stumbles, and manages to keep herself from breaking an ankle. 25, she amends, if she wants to get back in one piece.

They’d stopped below a long rock ledge sticking out of the side of a hill, in order to take advantage of the wind break. Willow crests that ledge finally, out of breath with head pounding, and stops short.

Of their three Brahmin, only one is left, but it’s laying on its side in the dust, lowing faintly with one hoof pitifully shivering. She crouches down, searching the area, but there’s nothing else alive here.

“Greg? Andy? Carla?” she calls. No answer. Willow scrambles to the side of the ledge and skitters down. Rocks roll every direction as she hits the bottom.

The remains of a fire are still smoldering next to the rock face. A huge metal pot is laying on its side on the ground, chunks of tato and liquid splattered across the ground. Where had they found that? There hadn’t been anything when Willow looked.

And around the fire…

“No. No, no, _no!”_ Willow gasps, rushing to the fire. Two small lumps, one wearing a red flannel, the other a pair of faded turquoise boots, lay side by side on one end of the fire. On the other side is a dark-haired man. Willow reaches for Carla, pulls her small, cold body up to cradle in her lap, and desperately feels for a pulse. She knows already that there’s no use, could tell by the first touch of her hand to Carla’s arm, but she tries anyway, frantic. Andy is just as cold, the front of his red flannel torn open, his small chest covered in blood. Willow gathers up the bodies of her two children and bends over them , not caring that blood is smearing across her clothing. She lets out a sound, a long keening sound that seems to spring from her throat unbidden. It sounds unhuman.

“No,” she whispers again, holding Andy’s tanned hand to her cheek. “No.”

She doesn’t know how long she sits there, long enough that her back hurts from hunching over and her left leg goes numb. Her voice goes before long, and it’s not until then that she starts crying in earnest, fat teardrops  that trickle down her nose and fall onto the two small figures she holds, dampening their clothes. It feels so damn stupid, so _useless_ to cry, but Willow can’t help it.

The Brahmin eventually quits its weak lowing behind her. When Willow looks, it’s fallen still. Probably dead, finally. She finds that her cheeks have dried somewhat. The fire is softly lighting the area around, casting long shadows on the body she’s not yet looked at. Feeling a clench in her gut, Willow carefully sets her children down on the ground and stalks around to the other side.

There lays Greg, eyes wide in shock. His hand still clutches a whiskey bottle, one that she knows very well she’d packed away earlier this afternoon. She’d hoped he hadn’t seen it.

“This is your fucking fault.” Willow says quietly, looking down at the corpse. They’d gotten him in the stomach, whoever it was; the cold is holding the stink down but Willow can imagine it, just looking at the insides spilling out of him. “You were supposed to be watching. You were supposed to protect them. This is your. Fucking. _FAULT.”_

She kicks him in the chest. The corpse rolls over onto its back, bottle sliding from its fingers. She kicks him again, in the side, in the head, accidentally catches the edge of the gaping hole in his stomach and sends up a cloud of stench that makes her nearly gag. Still, she keeps at it. He’s too dead to bruise anymore, so he just flops around like an especially large rag doll, head twisting comically. Willow gives him one last kick, right in the balls, and then digs the scratched golden ring from her pocket and throws it at him, before turning away.

She wants to take the time to do something for Carla and Andy, but she needs to go if she wants to find who did this. She’s already wasted enough time. So she just straightens them out gently, chest burning as she looks at their faces, closes their eyes and clasps their hands together like they used to do sometimes. They’d been so close, fighting only occasionally, happy to play together and do chores and have races that Willow would occasionally join in on, and she would always lose right at the end so that the winner could shriek in excitement and jump into her arms and be peppered with kisses.

 _Fuck._ Willow stands and turns away.

She digs through the packs on the dead Brahmin’s back, pulling out more ammo for her rifle, another knife, and a pistol. They go into her hunting pack. She doesn’t even think about food or water, too agitated to think straight, too upset to consider what she’s doing. Willow just throws everything into the pack, turns to the tracks in the dust of the other two Brahmin, and follows.

\--

Three days, she walks. She loses the trail on the first day, because her group slits the throat of the other two Brahmin for some reason and leaves them dead in the dust. They’ve been picked over for the smallest, most valuable trinkets. The rest has been left. Without the heavy Brahmin tracks to follow, they all but disappear. Willow tries anyway - looking for broken stems on plants, dropped pieces of bric-a-brac. She’ll think she’s got the scent, only for it to disappear right out from under her nose. Still, she hunts.

She has no idea where she is at this point, no comprehension of what’s around her. She’s delirious, honestly, hungry and dehydrated and so, so tired. It’s a miracle her legs keep moving, one after another. Finally, she comes back to herself, realizes she’s been trudging along without purpose for who knows how long, and falls to her knees. She doesn’t even know which direction she came from. There’s no finding the trail now.

Something is clicking frantically in her pocket. Woodenly, she pulls it out and inspects it. It’s her homemade geiger counter. Willow realizes she’s been feeling sick to her gut for a while now, has found herself half a klick from a bombshell crater without even noticing.

If there’s a better way to die, she can’t think of it. At least this way, she won’t have to be ripped apart by some hungry Wasteland animal while still alive. Willow stumbles to her feet, spots the huge crater on the horizon, and heads for it.

The bomb was dropped on a cluster of buildings that look like they might have been important some time ago. Now, they’re just shattered shells that have been left to rot. Probably haven’t even been picked through, since the radiation in the area is through the roof. If Willow gets any closer to ground zero, her geiger counter is going to implode.

She’s not going to though, because suddenly the nausea is overwhelming and she has to drop to her knees to vomit. Nothing comes out but thin clear liquid, burning with stomach acid and foul-smelling. Willow’s head is muddy, her vision starting to blur, and when she pushes to her feet, she just falls over instead. Groaning, she gets to her hands and knees and tries to crawl.

It’s almost like drifting off to sleep, how her senses start to leave her. She loses herself, then comes back to find she’s lying on the ground, a piece of rock digging uncomfortably into her cheek. Just lifting her hand to move it is too much effort, and it makes her stomach roil and her vision go black. After a few moments, she recovers, but it’s like her head has been stuffed with cotton. She doesn’t know if she can’t actually hear anything, or if there’s nothing to hear.

Then that’s it. LIke a light switch being flipped, she’s gone.

\--

“Hey. _Hey.”_

Somebody is shaking her by the shoulder. Her whole body aches.

“Bad place to take a fucking nap.” someone says gruffly. Willow cracks one eyelid, squeezes it back shut against bright light assaulting her retinas. Then she rolls over and gags.

A strong hand hauls her up, keeps her out of the sick. Willow feels as weak as a kitten, must be as weak as one by the way her companion is hauling her around so easily. She tries again to open her eyes, but it hurts as much this time as it did last time.

“You with me?” that gruff voice says again. Willow tries to reply, ends up with only a soft groan that makes her throat sting.

“Great. Try not to die.”

With that, Willow is being lifted into the air, and then she’s face down with something digging into her hip uncomfortably. Something wraps around her thigh; a rough, warm hand grips her wrist. She hangs, suspended across somebody’s shoulders, until the blood rush to her head is too much and she passes out again.

When she wakes up for the second time, it’s in a bed. This feels strange and wrong, mostly because Willow has spent most of her life in a caravan and can count on one hand the amount of times she’s woken up in a bed more than a week’s worth of days in a row. Having learned from the last time, she keeps her eyes closed against the bright light and gropes around instead, trying to get a feel for just exactly where the fuck she is.

“Holy shit,” somebody says. “You woke up.”

The voice is raspy, but definitely female. Willow cracks one eye open, sees a figure approaching. It’s still too bright to see any detail, but the head of the figure eventually ducks in front of the overhead lights, giving her eyes a much-needed break.

“Guess I owe Tulip some caps.” the voice says, bending over her. Doesn’t sound hostile, not that Willow’s in much shape to do anything about it. She feels something tug in the crook of her arm, looks over to see the blurry shape of an IV pole at the edge of the bed. Her vision is getting clearer, bit by bit.

“Where am I?” Willow asks. Her voice is damn near as raspy as her companion’s. Talking makes the whole inside of her throat sting, sending her into a coughing fit that nearly has her arching off the bed.

“Damn, take a breather, now.” a rough hand presses down on her shoulder, pushing her back into the mattress. “Let me get you some water.”

By the time the woman is back with the water, Willow is capable of sitting up and can see clearly. Clearly enough to see that her nursemaid is a ghoul, with scraggly dyed-pink hair and a white tank top covered in blood stains. Not entirely comforting.

“Welcome to the Chop Shop.” the ghoulette says, handing Willow the glass. Willow’s expression must be unpleasant, because she laughs. “I know, it sounds bad, but we’re really just a clinic. Doc Barrows runs the show, but he’s out right now, so it’s just me. I’m Nurse Graves.”

Willow takes a sip of the water cautiously. It doesn’t taste strange, but there’s not always a way to tell. In for a penny, in for a pound, she thinks, and drains the glass. Graves takes it from her and goes back to fiddling with her IV, which Willow can now see is hooked up to a bag of radaway.

“So… where is here, exactly?” Willow asks as Graves swaps out the empty bag for a fresh one. “Because I don’t recall passing out in a conveniently located clinic.”

“That’s because you didn’t.” Graves answers with a smile. “You were brought in by somebody. You’re in Underworld, in the Museum of History.”

 _The Museum of History?_ “That’s… I was at least fifteen miles away from there when I passed out.”

Graves disappears for a minute into a cabinet and comes back with a clean cloth and a bowl, into which she pours water from a basin. Willow accepts the cloth and dips it into the water so she can clean her face off. It stings, for some reason.

“More like 20, as he tells it. Took him two days to drag you back here. We didn’t think you were going to make it, honestly. You probably wouldn’t have if Charon hadn’t been the one to find you. He’s got a lot of first aid knowledge, turns out.” Graves stops and looks at her, a bit uncertain. “Listen… you know you passed out right next to a bomb crater, right?”

Willow brings the cloth down, finds it covered in flecks of dried skin. She brings a hand to her face, feels the way parts of her cheeks are raw and pitted, and then grimaces at her mottled hand.

“Great. Ghoulification?” Willow asks, already knowing the answer.

“Well, at least you’re not dead!” Graves replies cheerfully.

 _T_ _hat was the whole point of going there,_ Willow thinks irritably. Well, what's one more thing going wrong in her life? 

\--

She’s already halfway through the ghoulification process by the time she wakes up, so it’s not long before she starts finding chunks of hair on her pillow and her fingernails fall out. As it turns out, the radaway hooked up to her arm is part of a small experiment she’s apparently become part of, in which the resident doctor pumps her full of radiation-erasing drugs and records her reaction to see if it changes the ghoulification experience. It doesn’t. By month two, Willow no longer recognizes the face in the mirror.

She puts up with Barrows’ little experiment because he offers her a place to stay and a few caps’ pay in return, which isn’t something you turn down when you’re capless, your whole family is dead, and the only thing you have to your name is an old leather jacket and a heap of regrets. The caps are enough to buy an old battered laser rifle and a full magazine. Willow talks the good doctor into giving her a few days off, borrows some cans of food with a promise to pay back in full when she returns, and ventures out into the Wasteland.

The only thing left of her campsite when she finally reaches it is a couple rusty cans and a torn-up, stinking Brahmin corpse. Carla and Andy are gone. Willow tries not to think about what that means and scouts around until she can find a couple pieces of long, straight plywood and a few nails to drag back to the spot. Tucked under the overhang where they’d had their last dinner, Carla and Andy’s crosses will last for a long time. Willow presses a kiss to each of them, caresses them with a shaking hand, and heads back to Underworld.

\--

Carol, the oldest resident of Underworld and the owner of a large ‘bed and breakfast’ on the second floor, comes to Willow a few days after she gets back and asks her tentatively if she plans on staying. She doesn’t have to, only - it would be nice to have someone around to stand guard duty more often, especially when Charon’s gone, and isn’t Willow handy with a rifle? And there’s that old set of rooms that nobody is using on the second floor, Willow’s welcome to take them if she likes.

Well, what the hell else is she supposed to do? And that’s how Willow finds herself standing guard outside Underworld most days, smoking.

It’s the smoking that really makes the whole thing sink in, honestly. She’d stopped when she’d gotten pregnant with Carla and never picked it back up. Cigarette smoke is especially bad for kids’ lungs, she’d read somewhere. She doesn’t really give a shit about her own health, but she’d had gone to the ends of the earth to make sure Carla and Andy grew up strong. Fat lot of good it fucking did them.

With a sigh, Willow grinds out the stub of a cigarette and flicks it into the courtyard.

A clatter comes from the metro entrance. Willow noiselessly unslings her rifle and creeps to the overhand to peer down at the stairs, but relaxes when she recognizes the man at the other end of the rifle. The end of his rifle, that is, not hers - she’s entirely sure she’d made no noise, but Charon had still heard her anyway and had the butt of his R91 in his shoulder and aimed before she’d even known what was happening.

Willow’s seen Charon come and go, but she hasn’t had a chance to talk to him yet. Every time she sees him, he’s walking like he’s got somewhere to be, and he never talks to anybody else in Underworld. Never stops by the Chop Shop, or has dinner at Carol’s, or lounges in the front hall. Willow’s tried a couple times to get the scoop on him and that bar he works at, the Ninth Circle, but nobody wants to talk about it, except to tell her to stay away from it.

He doesn’t look like he’s in much of a hurry now. He climbs the steps of the metro wearily, and rather than heading straight into Underworld, slings the bulky pack off his shoulders and leans against the side of the building with an almost-unheard sigh of relief.

“Tough run?” Willow asks. Charon doesn’t reply. “Want one?”

She holds her pack out, not expecting much, but surprisingly, Charon takes it from her and shakes a cigarette out - not without a surreptitious, and overly suspicious, glance at her though. She offers her box of matches but Charon waves it off and produces one of his own, lighting the cigarette in a practiced move.

“Haven’t had a chance to say thank you yet. So. Thank you.” she says. There should be something more to say to the man who dragged her unconscious, irradiated ass twenty miles to the nearest settlement, but she doesn’t know what it is. If she asked why he did it, she doubts she’d get an answer. He’d have said something already if he was expecting payback, would have showed up in the first few days after she woke up and dangled it over her head like a threat. Instead, he’s treated her with the same lack of care as everybody else in the settlement, as if she’s invisible to him.

She remembers what he said, though.

_“Bad place to take a nap.”_

_“Try not to die.”_

The words of someone she could like, if she got to know them. Wouldn’t hurt to try.

“You pretty handy with that?” Willow says, gesturing at the rifle leaned up against Charon’s leg. He doesn’t look down at it, doesn’t even track her gesture with his eyes, but she knows he heard.

Charon grunts in response. And then,

“Would rather have a shotgun.”

Lo and behold, he fucking speaks. Willow offers him another cigarette, but Charon waves it away, picks up the rifle and the pack, and disappears inside.

\--

It takes her the better part of three months to get ahold of it, and another few weeks to track down parts and a how-to book to do the repairs it needs. The thing is busted up and scratched all to hell, but by the time she’s done with it, it could probably take down a Super Mutant in one shot if your aim was good enough.

The next time she sees Charon, she unslings the combat shotgun and holds it out to him. He takes it, runs his hands over it and inspects it critically, and then looks up at her.

The curl of one side of his mouth is all she needs. Willow grins back at him and shakes another cigarette out of her pack.

**Author's Note:**

> WARNINGS: Original character death; non-graphic (as in, totally off-screen) death of children; violence; unhappy relationships; serious angst; suicide attempt; maternal mourning; somewhat graphic description of the ghoulification process; absolutely no editing because I have a midterm tomorrow that I haven't studied for; lack of a satisfying, happy ending.


End file.
